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Unintended Consequences of Stand Your Ground Law

Background

Generally, it takes for a major incidence to bring forth the Unintended Consequences of a policy or legislation. This is also the case with the case of the killing of an Afro-American As a fall out of the Trayvon Martin killing by Zimmerman, a local watch volunteer based on his rights under Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, there is lot of debate about the intention and implementation of this legislation. The foundation for Stand Your Ground Law is A Castle Doctrine (also known as a Castle Law or a Defense of Habitation Law) is an American legal doctrine that designates a person’s abode (or, in some states, any place legally occupied, such as a car or place of work) as a place in which the person has certain protections and immunities and may in certain circumstances attack an intruder without becoming liable to prosecution.

Intended Consequences

Apparently, enacted as a crime control measure, Stand Your Ground Law allows extreme force to be A stand-your-ground law states that a person may use force in self-defense when there is reasonable belief of a threat, without an obligation to retreat first. In some cases, a person may use deadly force in public areas without a duty to retreat.

Unintended Consequences

Govt/State by vacating space its exclusive space for law and order and reverting to ancient practices of primacy individual rights over social rights is setting stage for individual vs. individual conflict, as witnessed in Taylor case to even escalate to group vs. individual and even more frighteningly, group vs. group confrontation. Maintaining law and order should be the exclusive preserve of the State and by ceding its ground on ideological basis creates a number of unintended consequences, having the society as a whole.

Solutions

The state has to retake the space given to individuals/groups under the Stand Your Ground Law not allow any exception or permission to handle fear of threat in their own hands.

This has to be concurrently combined with stricter gun control laws, so that tools to commit grievous harms are not available to ordinary citizens. Violence or threat of violence is much less when combatants are not equipped with guns and furthermore are reasonable certain that those threatening them also do not possess guns. Guns are unlike nuclear missiles that kept the peace due to MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine